Last modified Feb. 03, 2004
www.rssbandit.org
This folder contains the RSS Bandit Item formatting samples. If you start experimenting with these, ensure you use your own: copy/rename the interesting one, and change it to apply your needs.
You should be familiar with XSLT to be able to get it work.
The input of each XSLT stylesheet is a XML document fragment describing an RSS item.
The root element will be a newspaper element which will have contain one or more
RSS 2.0 channel elements as children.
The subelements of the channel element depend on the information
provided by a particular RSS feed. This format is identical to that emitted by FeedDemon's Newspaper Styles which means all FeedDemon styles are valid RSS Bandit styles and vice versa.
The required base elements of the channel element are provided for custom formatting.
Besides the subelements of the
item element specified in the RSS 2.0 spec there may also be elements from other
namespaces which correspond to various RSS 2.0 modules. Brief descriptions of such modules and elements
are provided in the table below.
| Module Name | Description |
| Dublin Core | The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set provides some standard metadata elements for describing published content on the web. |
| Content | A module for the actual content of websites, in multiple formats. The most commonly used
element from this module is content:encoded |
| Slash | The Slash RSS 1.0 module augments the RSS core and Dublin Core module's metadata with channel and item-level elements specific to SlashCode-based sites |
| CommentAPI | Describes the wfw:comment element which is used to provide the location of the
CommentAPI endpoint to aggregator software. |
| XHTML in RSS 2.0 | Specifies the use of the xhtml:body element to provide content in an RSS feed. |
| Easy News Topics | ENT is provides a mechanism for describing how topic information can be introduced into an RSS 2.0 news feed |
At first you have to enable the usage of a custom formatter within the options dialog: select the menu File|Options... and then the tab named "Display". Ensure the checkbox "Use a custom formatter" is checked. Then play with the existing formatter stylesheets.
Your stylesheet should produce valid (X)HTML. If you want to use CSS for visual effects, ensure to use it in
the embedded form to keep it with your formatting templates. Do not forget to insert an HTML base element
within the HTML HEAD section to get relative links of images resolved by the browser control! The existing stylesheets can be used as examples as to how to generate this correctly for the different views.
There is support to split the css stylesheet to a separate file. If your formatter stylesheet want to use that, you have to add these two prameters on the root level (child of <xsl:stylesheet>):
They are filled by RssBandit to reflect:
Now you can code a line like this:
pointing to a css file located at C:\Program Files\RssBandit\templates.
Feel free to join the Developer community at dev.rssbandit.org
by providing patches, suggestions or error reporting!
Rss Bandit users may visit our forum at www.rssbandit.org/forum.